Interview for "To Love Mercy" author Frank S. Joseph

We are very pleased to talk with Frank S. Joseph, long-timewriter who has recently penned his first novel, "To LoveMercy." Welcome to Reader Views Frank.Juanita: Thanks for talking with us today Frank. Please tellus the story within the pages of "To Love Mercy."Frank: "To Love Mercy" is a fable about blacks and whites,Christians and Jews, conflict and forgiveness. It tells the storyof two young boys - one black, one white - who meet underthe worst of circumstances, in a darkened parking lot following a Chicago White Sox game on June 15, 1948. The black child, whose nickname is Sass, is injured accidentally and the white family takes him - most unwillingly - to a nearby emergency room. But the white child, whose name is Steve, can't get the incident out of his mind. The next day, Steve finds his way to Sass's hospital bedside for a tense encounter. That would be the end of it, except Steve's grandfather Nate accuses the black child, Sass, of stealing a precious silver tali
sman from him. Nate threatens to throw Sass in jail. So Steve finds Sass and the two of them go off on a search for the silver talisman, which takes them across a hostile city over a long day and night. At the end, these two boys have survived disasters and come to an understanding of their world that is deeper than that of their own mothers and fathers.Juanita: Tell us the significance of the contrast between the innocent young friends and the racial inspired, fearful parents?Frank: The parents are victims of the pressures of society, racial and religious. But the boys are seeing these things for the first time, and we readers see these things as they see them, through their eyes.Juanita: What was your experience and history with Chicago?Frank: The story in "To Love Mercy" is a story of what my childhood might have been. Like Steve, I grew up in the '40s and '50s in Hyde Park, a comfortable neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that was then heavily Jewish. But my g
randfather Nathan Joseph owned and operated a movie theater in the heart of Bronzeville, the ghetto where just about every black Chicagoan lived during the '40s. Where I lived, in Hyde Park, was just 30 blocks from the States Theatre, but a world away. What if little Frankie Joseph had met a kid like Sass? How would my life have changed?Juanita: Have you based any of the characters on anyone you know? Is there any of you woven into any of the characters?Frank: Absolutely. Almost all the major characters are based on real people in my growing-up. Steve, of course, is based on me. The grandfather, Nate, who owns the movie theater, is based on my own grandfather, Nathan Joseph, although the character of Nate is meaner than my own grandpa was. But Sass is pure fiction. One day this kid appeared in my head and started talking. I just wrote down what I heard.Juanita: That is very interesting. The dialogue of Steve and Sass is very accurate in its depiction of how innocent chi
ldren would talk. Tell us a little more about these characters.Frank: Steve is naïve - he is constantly putting himself in harm's way because of his innocent and trusting nature - but he's worldly too. Coming from a comfortable background, he's been places and done things. Sass, on the other hand, hasn't even been outside his own neighborhood ... has never been the Loop 30 blocks north, doesn't even realize there's a lake - big one - 10 blocks east. But Sass sees everything with perfect clarity. It's easy to B.S. Steve, but no one can ever B.S. Sass.Juanita: You did extensive research for this book. Tell us about this process, and the inclusion of the very powerful Afterword with historical pictures and quotes.Frank: The first three chapters or so just poured out of me. Then I hit a wall. I needed to start writing the Bronzeville characters and I realized I just didn't know them well enough. So I put on my reporter hat. I started calling black-oriented organizations
and offices - the public library branch in Bronzeville, the offices of the politicians who represent the area, etc. - asking for leads to people who grew up in Bronzeville in the '40s and '50s. With much luck I found a half-dozen such people - ordinary folks, with extraordinary stories to tell - and interviewed them on tape. I also spent hours at the Chicago Historical Society, especially in the 1995 records of the Douglas-Grand Boulevard Neighborhood Oral History Project. I listened to hours of tapes and read dozens of transcripts. From these I extracted the stories that appear in the Afterword - a history of Bronzeville in the voices of the people who lived there. And we illustrated the Afterword with black-and-white photos, mostly taken by a white photographer named Wayne Miller. Miller took these photos over a two-year period, then they just went into a drawer - they weren't seen or shown for some 40 years. When Miller was in his 80s, the photos were published by the Un
iversity of California Press as "Chicago South Side, 1946-1948." We selected seven of these marvelous photos to illustrate the Afterword.Juanita: Frank, the Bronzeville area in 40's Chicago was then rich in black culture. Why were you drawn to this time and place?Frank: Because of the time I spent there. When I was a little kid, my dad would take me down to my grandpa's theater, where I could go up into the projection booth and watch the movie. I would watch as the operator, George Machree, lit the carbon arc that movie projectors used to use, an exciting and terrifying process Steve describes in the novel. And out on the street, I would see this incredible liveliness that made Bronzeville truly "Chicago's Harlem." But I have to add, Bronzeville was a scary place for a little white kid. My mom and dad were truly liberal people for their time, but when my dad would take us down there in the car, he'd say, 'Lock the doors.' This disconnect between what my parents said and ho
w they behaved may actually have been the seed from which this novel grew.Juanita: How do the families come to terms with their fear?Frank: The families in the novel never do. They go at one another with insults and epithets. It's the kids who finally reach an understanding of the world they live in.Juanita: Frank, what is your statement to readers through the story of "To Love Mercy?"Frank: As people read this novel, I'd like them to be thinking how, in some ways, the world has come an incredibly long way since June 1948 ... and in some ways, it hasn't changed at all.Juanita: For people who haven't traveled to Chicago, what is Bronzeville like today and how has it changed?Frank: It's a shadow of its former self. Starting in the early '50s, urban renewal began mowing the neighborhood down. The construction of the Robert Taylor Homes - giant skyscraper projects that became the crime-ridden shame of public housing and eventually were torn down - that construction destroy
ed most of the businesses along State Street, including my grandpa's theater. The theater was boarded up some time in the '50s and the building was torn down around 1961 or 1962, leaving almost nothing in a block that had once been one of the busiest in the city of Chicago. Now, some 50 years later, a real estate boom is going on in Bronzeville, which after all is located only 3 ½ miles south of the Loop. But only about 20% of the original housing stock exists; the rest was urban-renewed to the ground decades earlier. There are still blocks and blocks of vacant lots.Juanita: You have had a significant writing career. Tell your readers about your writing history.Frank: When I was 21 and a creative writing major in college, I wanted to be a novelist. Instead, I became a journalist. I had a wonderful career, first with the City News Bureau of Chicago, then the Chicago bureau of The Associated Press - where I covered the Democratic National Convention disorders, th
e Detroit riot, Dr. King's march into Cicero Illinois and many other eruptions of the mid and late '60s. I moved to the Washington DC area, where I still live, and became an editor at The Washington Post during the Watergate years. Then I went into the newsletter business, first as a journalist, now as a publisher. But I never stopped thinking about the novel I wasn't writing. And at last, I've written it.Juanita: Congratulations for not forgetting about your dream. Was there one particular thing that inspired this novel?Frank: "Huckleberry Finn" was the book I had in mind when I wrote "To Love Mercy." Sass, in his clear-eyed appraisal of the world and his moral center, is like Huck. And like Huck and Jim, Steve and Sass are a white and a black person thrown together on a quest. I think the Great American Novel already has been written, and it is "Huckleberry Finn." I would not dare compare my talents to Mark Twain's, but his book inspired me.Juanita: Frank, you covered m
any of the hot issues during the 60's. Some would say there are many similarities to the 60's and the times we find ourselves in today. I would imagine you have a unique and informed perspective on how things have changed yet stayed the same in this country. Would you share your thoughts?Frank: Race was the big issue facing America then, and so it remains. I say that knowing many will disagree with me, but here's why I believe it: The race issue never goes away. It just sits there like the 800-pound gorilla in the living room, because we aren't willing to have an honest discussion about it. In some small way, I'm trying to start such a discussion.Juanita: How long was this book in the making, and what was your inspiration for writing "To Love Mercy?"Frank: It took about three years from start to finish of the first draft. Of course, after it was accepted for publication, the publisher wanted significant changes. My inspiration was my feeling that blacks and whites see
the same events differently ... that children have their own way of seeing the world, which is different from the way we adults see the world ... and that disconnect I mentioned between what people say about race and religion, and how they actually behave.Juanita: Frank, who do you hope reads your book?Frank: Obviously, Chicagoans will get an extra kick out of this novel, with its many recreations of beloved places long gone - Riverview Amusement Park, for example, and the old Maxwell Street flea market, not to mention Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox, and Bronzeville itself. But beyond Chicago, I think any adult who ponders the way things are in the America we live in - as well as any thinking teen-ager - will enjoy reading "To Love Mercy."Juanita: Do you have plans for another novel in the future?Frank: I have one half-written already. It's set in 1965 and it draws on my experiences at The Associated Press, covering the ghetto riots. At first I thought this novel wa
s my effort to understand what was going on during those riots - how people who had next to nothing to begin with, could burn down what little they did have. But as I reread this draft, I'm taken with its humor and romance. So I'm trying to bring out those qualities along with the serious stuff.Juanita: How can your readers contact you or find out more about "To Love Mercy?"Frank: Just go to Juanita: Do you have any last thoughts for your readers?Frank: This has been a pretty serious interview, Juanita, so I just want to let readers know that, hey, this is a pretty funny novel. Check out Steve and Sass's theological discussion about hot dogs, for example. And also, I think the novel is a pretty easy read. It was important to me to write a book that would be hard to put down - a page-turner. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether I succeeded. I hope they'll try.

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